The Kirkus Prize is one of the richest literary awards in the world, with a prize of $50,000 bestowed annually to authors of fiction, nonfiction and young readers’ literature. It was created to celebrate the 81 years of discerning, thoughtful criticism Kirkus Reviews has contributed to both the publishing industry and readers at large. Books that earned the Kirkus Star with publication dates between November 1, 2014, and October 31, 2015, are automatically nominated for the 2015 Kirkus Prize, and the winners will be selected on October 23, 2015, by an esteemed panel composed of nationally respected writers and highly regarded booksellers, librarians and Kirkus critics.

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As a high schooler, Kirker Butler once choreographed the opening number of a beauty pageant.

“I grew up in a small town in the South, and my mother and father were on the county fair board. My mother was put in charge of the pageant. We still don’t know why,” says Butler, who set the steps to Neil Diamond’s “America.”

“—perfect, right?”

When it comes to the perfect person to write a satirical sendup of kiddie pageants ...

A young black man named Eddie, driving through the darkness of rural Louisiana, terrycloth wrapped where his hands once lived: with this violent, hectic image, James Hannaham opens Delicious Foods, his second novel. It’s a hell of a hook, yes—questions raised, hearts racing—but from there, the prologue settles down. Upon reaching a small town, Eddie starts a successful business as the “handyman without hands,” and although the terrors of his own past never leave him, he finds some bit ...

Christian Kiefer is smart. He has a PhD in American literature and teaches at American River College in Sacramento. His mentors are T.C. Boyle, Richard Ford, Pam Houston and Denis Johnson, who he thanks in the acknowledgements for his second novel, The Animals.

The Animals is so good, it’s hard to be smart about it. It’s got the lyrical language of top-tier literary fiction with the compulsive readability of a blood-pumping crime novel. It makes you think and feel ...

Previewing the books first published overseas that will soon be arriving in America.

By
Catherine Hickley
on
March 25, 2015

Andrew O'Hagan, copyright broaddaylight

This is the launch of a feature we will publish on the 15th of each month to give you advance insight into books first published overseas. You’ll be hearing about these books when they arrive in America; now you know how the readers and critics who saw them first reacted to them. —Ed.

The Bible offers a warning or two about worshipping false idols; Allan Gurganus’s recent novella, Decoy, gives readers a shelf-full of Biblical exegesis regarding the human complications of modern-day idolatry. If the object of worship is one’s hand-picked best friend (who might not know that yet), stand by for comedy and Old Testament calamities.

As Gurganus suggests, “We’re often most confused by the very person we love and desire most. We are snowblind.”

“As the streets…are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist, lawyers’ clerks will have to make flying leaps into the mud; young lady typists will have to fidget behind you. In the streets of London where beauty goes unregarded, eccentricity must pay the penalty, and it is better not to be very tall, to wear a long blue cloak, or to beat the air with your left hand.”

I confess: S.G. Browne is so funny that he once made me disrupt an entire hospital emergency room. I was in the waiting room reading Browne’s debut novel Breathers (2009), a romantic comedy about zombies. When I hit the line “Is it necrophilia if we’re both dead?” I burst out laughing, disturbing every poor soul around me. (Note: the author of Breathers is rather proud of this achievement.)

Since then, Browne has published three more well-received and equally ...

“Why don’t you write me a trashy book and make us all rich?” Jill Alexander Essbaum’s late father used to tease. Although she certainly didn’t have her father in mind while writing the steamy sex scenes of her captivating debut novel, Hausfrau, she has him to thank. Her father’s Sidney Sheldon and Harold Robbins books piqued her early interest in bawdy subjects.

Hausfrau follows the carnal wreckage of a tired housewife, Anna Benz, an American expat living in a ...

LATEST RECIPIENT OFTHE KIRKUS STAR

Like Gaddis, Cohen also recognizes the laughs and peril at this technologically challenging stage of the human comedy and its new questions about what people are searching for, how the results may affect them, and what it all may cost.

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